Andrew Lansley can at least be grateful for one thing: he isn’t ill. There’s no knowing what mad vengeance hospital staff might wreak on the Health Secretary. The poor man could go in for a routine operation and come round from the anaesthetic to find that his buttocks have been transplanted to his face, say, or that his ears have been amputated and replaced with a donkey’s. At any rate, he’d need to be wary of the hospital meals. This is of course sensible advice for all patients, but in his case the poisoning might be deliberate.

At present, it’s fair to say, Mr Lansley isn’t desperately popular, except among Labour MPs – he has, after all, handed them an issue on which they feel confident voters actually support them. With glee they’ve watched as royal colleges decry his health bill, and protestors decry his “codswallop”. In Labour eyes the bill is savage, callous, and a godsend.

Today Mr Lansley took questions in the Commons. Labour fell on him with delighted indignation. The first “codswallop” joke came eight minutes in (from Jamie Reed, Shadow Health Minister). Dennis Skinner, MP for Bolsover and purveyor par excellence of quivering apoplexy, wailed that it “hurts me to think that after all the wonderful NHS treatment I’ve had, I’m still here to tell the story”. That probably isn’t quite what he meant to say, but no doubt the emotion of the moment had got to him. Mr Lansley responded to all this with unusual spirit, but he isn’t a man built for confrontation: no matter how loudly he raised his voice, he still had the look of a depressed dishcloth.

There’s a lesson here for the Government, albeit one it’s too late to learn: if you want to reform the NHS, for heaven’s sake don’t let on. Millions of people are jumpily protective of the health service, and will assume any Tory reform spells danger. When a Tory says “NHS reform”, many people hear, “Your mother will be tipped out of her hospital bed and made to perform her own hip operation in the car park using a Swiss army knife and a pair of marigolds. This is to free up her bed for a banker suffering from a chipped fingernail.”

Therefore you have to present your reform as a mere tweak. The public must receive the impression, however false, that you plan to do nothing more radical than widen nurses’ name badges or increase the variety of coffee in hospital vending machines. No10 seems to have realised this: it’s now briefing that the reform is “evolution not revolution”. It might have tried that line sooner. As far as the bulk of the public is concerned, the health bill couldn’t look more like a revolution if the Cabinet were to march through London brandishing GPs’ heads on sticks.

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Frustrated by Mr Lansley’s failure to sell the bill, No10 has reportedly ordered him to cut the jargon. His language is normally about as clear as a doctor’s handwriting, all “universal proportionalism” and “integrated care pathways”. Today, though, he restricted himself to a single “outcomes framework”, and insisted his bill “is only about simple things”, such as “giving patients choice” and “empowering doctors and nurses”.

The message from No10 has evidently got through to Mr Lansley. To that, at least, he seems to be listening.